Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
The Open Work
Studies modern works of music, literature and art that are deliberately ambiguous or unfinished and call on the interpreter to complete them.
Introduction
“The Open Work” appeared in 1962 and grew out of essays of the late 1950s on new music, written while Eco worked at the RAI in Milan. It opens with works “in movement” such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI or Luciano Berio’s Sequenza for flute, whose performers help to decide their order or form, and extends the idea to James Joyce, to informal painting and to live television. Eco argues that every work of art is open to interpretation, but that modern poetics make this openness deliberate, as an image of a world without a fixed centre; information theory helps him describe the relation between order and ambiguity. The book was taken up by the neo-avant-garde of Gruppo 63 and widely translated; the German edition, “Das offene Kunstwerk”, appeared in 1973, the English one in 1989.
More works by Umberto Eco
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